This was by no means easy Lord Hastings perfectly understood the situation and

insisted as the price of peace on conditions which should effectually curb Nepal The
richest part of that State and the part which furnished it with the sinews of war was
the lush unhealthy borderland at the foot of the hills the Tarai Lord Hastings
declared that the cession of the Tarai was the first condition of a truce Nepal will
never consent to give you up the Tarai the Nepalese replied to our envoy Mr
Gardner.

Take the Tarai and you will leave us without the means of subsistence for the hills
without it are worth nothing. It was precisely because Lord Hastings knew that the
loss of the Tarai would disable Nepal for further aggressions that he determined to
have it Mr Gardner's orders were peremptory and after another struggle Nepal gave
up the Tarai by the Treaty of Segauli in 1816.

He soon perceived that in a country without trade outlets the natural and inevitable
occupation of the people is war Military service was the only means by which the
classes above the servile tillers of the soil could find scope for their energies The
Queen Regent and the Prime Minister knew that their own tenure of office depended
in the long run on their fulfilling this fundamental condition of providing a career of
arms for the chiefs and high spirited castes in Nepal As the years of enforced peace
went on and those castes suffered no depletion from war the standing army had to
be constantly increased In 18 16 Gardner estimated it at 10,000 men. By 1819 it
had been raised to 12,000 and in 1 83 1 it reached 15,000 The last figure however
was the peace establishment which is in constant pay and under regular discipline
and is only one third of the force that Nepal could at a very short notice call into the
field and that in a most efficient condition well drilled well armed with muskets and
bayonets and tolerably well accoutered.
ensures the return of the Dhakeriah (or soldier off the roll) but little wanting in his
proper accomplishments as an efficient soldier 1 Hodgson's first difficulty therefore
was that the whole upper classes in Nepal were organised into a hereditary force
whose sole career in life was military service.

His second was that by the retrocession of part of the Tarai after the war of 1815 16
as an earnest of our goodwill Lord Hastings had himself supplied the means for
maintaining and developing this system The Tarai or rich malarial borderland at the
foot of the hills from being a tract nearly depopulated previous to the war had
become under the security of possession guaranteed by Lord Hastings to Nepal a
source of net revenue to the amount of ten lakhs a year then over 100,000 What we
regarded as not worth retaining in 1816 now yields a noble revenue and has
capabilities of affording three times the amount.